TRAFFIC! – one of the most needless side effects of civilisation. But is it always UNWANTED? Have you ever heard about “Organic traffic” or “Referral traffic”? What is it and why do you need it?

Why does THIS traffic need your attention?

Whilst working on the Q&A regarding practical aspects of ecommerce (coming soon!), I thought I will talk you through some interesting yet left a bit aside topic.

TRAFFIC – yes.

We hate it (London is one of the places in the world where you can easily get to the higher level of that feeling). But there is a kind of traffic, that we need. This is the online traffic. The more people are able to find your blog/online shop/digital products/personal brand etc., the higher chance for you to convert the traffic into an income (the word “conversion” is not coincidental here). Obviously it is not only about the number of people, other things also matter – UX (user experience) on your website, ease to find what they are looking for and successfully get to the checkout, your products, quality, industry, customer service etc. but what is crucial is bringing THE RIGHT PEOPLE to your business.

Targeting people that will want to buy from you is important

I am a big fan of working less but earning more.

And the traffic is my good friend here. Why?

The above can be achieved by the number of aspects:

1. automating things,

2. making your digital place easy to find by the people you want to target as potential buyers,

3. customer service limited to assisting with unusual requests or helping solve problems only,

4 . investing less (or not at all) in developing something, that will not be converted into an income (so avoiding unnecessary non value added things – by the way I recommend familiarizing with “Lean” as a way of thinking about things – they have great courses!),

5. scaling the sales (this is super exciting to me and I will make sure to write an article about that soon 🙂 ),

6. using the technology to work for you when you rest or sleep (24/7, 365)

More time to rest when the technology works for you

One of the tools to achieve that is taking care of FREE TRAFFIC on the website (or shop, blog etc.).

Why?

The answer is: SEO – Search Engine Optimisation

You can find millions of articles about it so I will leave it out for now. But one of the aspects of SEO is free traffic. FREE.

Here is a definition:

Organic traffic (Free traffic) – these are users who found our website through organic search results displayed by search engines (eg Bing, Google, Yahoo). Complimentary search results are all search results that are not purchased ads on search results pages. So, organic traffic usually comes from the first 10 items of the results (…). (you can read more here).

This is essentially a number of users that visited your website without you promoting in actively by purchasing adds campaign or chargeable promotion. This does not mean, that to attract that traffic, there was no expenditure at your end to get you where you are in the search results, but you have not paid directly for promotion.

A example of my organic traffic from 19th Feb when I was not promoting the website anywhere or not sharing it with the world externally – essentially no investment, only the content and basic SEO

We all (or most of us) know, that to earn online, you have to be visible and searchable. This is specifically important for people like me and you, who are focused on monetizing their potential, passion, skills or physical products (stored or dropshipped – whichever model works for you) by offering it online and attracting potential buyers. Who your buyers are will also be a separate topic on this blog.

How do we differentiate the organic traffic from paid promotions? In Google they can be found under the list of first results accompanied by the word indicating, that it is an Ad. User has started their search and if your website has been indexed and classified as a relevant response to the phrase used by the browsing user, it will be displayed to them as one of the results. Who checks the results on a Google page no. 100? 🙂 That is why it is worth having the tools allowing you to win the podium on the first page. And that is the traffic we need.

What about other types?

PAID – comes from paid ads or campaigns – means expenditure. Nothing wrong about it but at the early stages of monetizing your potential we want to squeeze out as much as possible from the technology with minimal investment of funds (this is supposed to bring us extra income, not cost us our savings 🙂 ). The time for scaling your income will come soon 🙂

Referral – this comes from different kinds of ‘referrals’ from another websites (also important). The definitions says: it is a traffic from the website, which appears in Google Analytics reports as a source of traffic. It originates from referring websites – that is from other websites. In order to count a given user as a referral traffic, the user must click on a link leading to our page from another site. The definition comes from here and by me linking the website to my own post, I am creating a referral for them. Now if a SEO expert on their website sees the traffic coming from my website, because my visitor clicked on the link I shared, that will be counted as referral traffic. It also helps with positioning websites (the more referrals to your website exist in www, the higher your website is likely to be ranked by the browsers = easier searchable). So it’s good to be a friend with others and sharing links to each others’ websites (and that is also partially why I have decided to share my followers’ details on this website, to help my visitors find you guys too). Let’s not take the competition too seriously and try help each other, shall we 🙂 And this traffic is also FREE.

Direct – when someone actually types in your web address to the browser.

So you can see, that free traffic is actually something, that can work for you, if you give it enough attention.

It seems like its value and potential is theoretically going down due to paid ads taking the lead in the recent years. It is however not to be underestimated as there was some research done by the high-tech people, that even the direct category can also generate some organic traffic. So without having in-depth hi-tech understanding of what is going on behind the browsers’ scenes, the conclusion is simple – it is a good source of visits, costing less than maintaining costly campaigns and with a decent strength and potential.

If you don’t know how to attract this traffic – there are lots of tutorials everywhere. I am again a big fan of not spending if not necessary. If you however tried different things and still no results – you can request a SEO audit of your website, which still is cheaper that those mentioned campaigns (which can also be removed if they unintendedly break the advertising rules – and it actually happens!).

What other benefits does it also give you?

Diversity of sources – more traffic on your website/blog/in your shop

Not being reliant on one source in case something goes wrong – more financial safety if you have an online shop already (every drop in traffic can mean potential income loss)

Money saving – more money left to spend on holiday or investment if you like 🙂

Let me know if this was helpful or if you need to know more about traffic, SEO, SEM, positioning. This is not a technical article, the purpose of it is to give you an understanding of why the traffic is needed and were to take it from without investing.

Hope you found it useful and interesting on your way to have a new source of income and satisfaction.

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